(First, the disclaimer: I am a member of The Royal Manticoran Navy, which is the official fan club of David Weber in general and The Honorverse in particular. My judgement may be a bit skewed here. Then again, when isn't it?)
The World's Most Awesome Girlfriend (TM) hit me up on Facebook Messenger one day to ask if there were any Baen books out that I hadn't had a chance to buy and/or review yet that I wanted. This was a couple of weeks before Christmas. Now, being The World's Most Awesome GF, she's usually really good at figuring out what to buy without my input, but I was happy to provide it this time. I immediately replied "Latest Honor Harrington" because I had just woken up and could not for the life of me remember what the title was before having sucked down any caffeine. About twenty minutes later I looked it up and remembered that it was Uncompromising Honor.
I'm glad I did too, because this was a really good book. It seemed to have a manufacturing defect though. Once I picked it up it wouldn't let go of my hand. Seriously. It's almost like this inanimate object didn't understand that I have responsibilities I need to attend to and that I had to get moving out the door and off to work. Maybe Baen should have named it Uncompromising Attention Whore instead of Uncompromising Honor. I mean, it just wouldn't leave me alone.
Now, to be fair, this one did start off a bit slower than I probably would have preferred. It takes a moment to get up to speed. David Weber's book, particularly in his Honorverse and Safehold series, do tend to be a bit on the talky side. Usually that's a good thing because it's how Weber keeps us informed on what's going on with his massive and far flung universes. This time though, I'm wondering if an action sequence at the beginning of the book wouldn't have spiced things up a bit and drawn the reader in a bit sooner.
That's not to say there's no action in the book. I remember one particular passage that lasted for a good chunk of the book and had my eyes glued to the pages. It was definitely an action sequence and a bit gut wrenching. I loved it though and not just because it was an awesome action scene. Weber did something in that passage. He is simply the best at it, bar none.
Something that a lot of authors of military science fiction, and both other forms of military science fiction and non-fiction forget is that militaries have histories and traditions that go farther back than just the people they're writing about. When Hal Moore was ordered to form an air cavalry unit to fight in the Vietnam War he asked for the same designation that the Cavalry unit that fought at the Little Big Horn had. Thus was the Seventh Cavalry reformed. They damn near go wiped out like their namesake too, but that's a subject of its own book and movie. My point is that these traditions do exist. They're real and the memory of what has gone before is a source of inspiration for the current generation. Weber gets that and he weaves it so well into his narrative that the story wouldn't work without it. Weber was once a history major at the graduate level and he has obviously done some serious research into the way that real militaries work.
Like pretty much every other Honorverse novel, Uncompromising Honor is a war story. In war people die. Something else Weber does very well is exposing us to the sense of loss of those left behind. A lot of authors of fiction will show the reactions of the rest of the unit when a warrior passes. Any work of military history includes at least one table of casualty figures. What often gets left out is the cost to non-combatants, at least in a non-financial sense. Weber gets that and he makes sure to let us see the other side of the conflict.
I, of course, am a huge fan of the strong female protagonist, and Honor Harrington will kick your ass. That's if she decides not to shoot, nuke or drop a kinetic energy weapon on it. I hear that she's pretty good with a laserhead too, and that's not just a weird 80s insult for nerds. She's more than that though. Honor is both a mother and a warrior. She has to deal with the problems faced with many of members of the US Military have to deal with in the real world, planet Earth, circa 2019. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. She still has the edge that she's always had. There's just so much more to her now. I wish I could force all of the people who talk down about "military fiction and its cardboard heroes" to sit down and read Uncompromising Honor. They might actually learn something.
The only truly bad part of my experience in reading this book comes from my own stupidity. See, when I have a book made in honest to God Dead Tree Format, I have a tendency to flip to the end and find out how many pages are in the thing. I've done this since probably the first time I read a book that had chapters. THIS time though, I noticed that there was an afterword. Now, the whole point of an afterword is that you're supposed to read it AFTER you read the book. I know this. I'm college educated. I read it anyway. I am -officially- a dipshit for reading the afterword first.What I'm saying here is that if you buy the book (and you should buy the book) you should not read the afterword first because there's stuff in there that you don't want to know about until after you read the dadgum book.
Uncompromising Honor is, I think, the 25646464654654654564465456th book in the series. I may be exaggerating slightly. At any rate, the Honorverse is a huge series with multiple complex relationships and you really need to start it at the beginning, with On Basilisk Station. You'll thank me.
Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Laser Heads
On Basilisk Station
David Weber
Baen Books, 2018
Uncompromising Honor is available for purchase at the following link:
And, since I mentioned them, We Were Soldiers Once... and Young and We Were Soldiers are available at the following links as well:
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